This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works.
So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.
This is too unrealistic a statement. Democracy in the US has had some destruction wrought on it since the media started believing that activism and opinion journalism were more important than facts, and that change is the goal of journalism. That's a massive blow to democracy - far greater than anything happening today. We are living in its results.
> Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation.
This is totally wrong - autocracies can be extremely efficient. Mussolini made the trains run on time. That is one of the few problems the autocracies don't have, unless their bureaucracy is genuinely so inefficient it can't carry out the autocrat's will.
All government options and private companies can definitely reward loyalty over competence.
Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them.
—Sparta
I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals.
Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it.
Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design.
What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
Which is what's happening again.
Assume every post here is automatically anti something and don't engage. Your mental health isn't worth it.
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
Thus, economic inequality leads to backslide of democracy:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-de...
20 years ago even with automation etc you needed armies of people to make something work. It was more of a transformation of the type of work. Look at the amount of work Amazon as a company has created. It changed how people buy stuff etc, but behind the scenes there is always human workforce, to deliver, to invent the recommendation algorithms, to package the items, etc (although here there is heavy automation).
Now the idea is that we need AI so we can replace humans, so "people can spend more time on what they like to do". Which is what, searching for jobs on LinkedIn?
Just because capital is happy to take advantage our current incompetent authoritarian populist administration doesn't doesn't mean they don't prefer predictable technocrats in charge. Trump was outspent during all of his campaigns.